Doug Lemov's field notes

Reflections on teaching, literacy, coaching, and practice.

11.13.17 Three Types of Writing in the Classroom

Image result for three hands writing

This is the first of several posts I hope to write about writing—why it is important and how despite our best intentions, I think we can teach and practice it better.

Some context: I’ve visited a series of better-than-average and mostly-very-good schools recently—perhaps ten in at least three states—and afterwards I find myself thinking most of all about writing.

The good news is that in “better-than-average” schools—high and high-ish performing schools serving kids of low socio-economic status—there’s a lot of writing going on. That’s good and critical.

But it’s often poor quality writing, and often I suspect it’s not getting much better. It tends to be one-dimensional. And I’ve started to realize that these things are connected.

Typically I will enter a classroom and watch students writing industriously, answering prompts about the texts they are reading. As I observe I will note that they are producing diligent but often non-sensical writing—a hodge-podge of phrases and words strung together in largely inchoate ways. Kids are earnestly trying to respond to a complex prompt but they have very little Syntactic Control, which Bruce Saddler defines as “the ability to create a variety of sentences that clearly express an intended meaning” and which we sometimes adapt in our workshops as “the ability to use a variety of syntactic structures to create a variety of sentences that clearly express an intended meaning.”

I see, as Judith Hochman puts it The Writing Revolution , a lot of writing assigned but not a lot of learning to write.

To help explain why I think this happens, I want to distinguish three different kinds of writing: Summative Writing, Formative Writingand Developmental Writing.

Summative Writingis writing that uses an explicit structure to explain and justify a final fully-formulated idea—or, as a wise colleague put it a tiny bit more cynically: It’s writing in which students are proving they have learned a skill by employing a process we have taught them .

It involves questions like:

  • How does the author characterize the dust storm in chapter three? Use evidence from the text to support your opinion.

Or

  • “What was the author’s purpose in writing this passage? Explain how her specific diction demonstrates this.”

To complete these tasks a student must have a clear argument and then employ a structure involving different types of sentences to build a cogent and formal argument.

It is a valid and worthwhile activity. But there are potential problems:

What if I don’t yet have a strong, clear opinion about the text? What if I am still deciding what I think? [This does not just apply to students. I insert a small plea here for the importance of not knowing your opinion about something right away. I very often read something and think—“It’s too early to decide what I think about it. I don’t have enough context.” But I’m struck by how often writing or discussion activities rush students to judge].

What if I can’t yet build sentences of different types with clarity and complexity?

When those things happen Summative Writing breaks down. You get low value or disorganized sentences in pursuit of ill-formed ideas. I’ll come back to this idea in a moment.

Formative Writingis writing in which students try to develop their ideas instead of justifying and explaining a fully formed idea. It is an interim step they learn to use writing to decide what they think.

It involves questions like:

  • Did Esperanza make the right decision in giving away her doll?
  • Why do you think she gave away her doll?
  • Or even: How would the sentence have sounded different if the author had described Ralph as “dirty and with unbrushed hair” rather than “with filthy body and matted hair” as he does?

Formative Writingis still about the text. It’s not, “Describe a time you gave something away,” but it is focused on developing thoughts more than justifying them . To answer, students do not need to yet have a cogent and complete argument. They are supposed to use the writing as a tool to help them get there.

Reflecting in writing helps students to decide upon what they can later seek to support and justify in Summative Writing.  It can engage students more emotionally and help them see how writing helps them clarify their thinking. And it can be lower-risk—a space where you can begin to explore without having to know your thesis yet.

[An aside: This post is an example of Formative Writing; I am using it to clarify this vague notion I started with that there are three different ways to write. I did not have a thesis when I began.]

But you still must seek to refine ideas in syntax. And this in turn helps build the skill of precision in expression that Summative Writing requires.

Let me be clear: Neither Formative nor Summative Writing is ‘better.’ Students need to do both. In fact they are synergistic in a hundred ways. For example Formative Writing helps me engage in and care about the text so that I understand why I would want to sustain an argument about it in Summative Writing which helps me to understand what I should seek in my Formative Writing.

But I don’t always see a balance of the two in the classrooms I visit.  In the schools I’ve been visiting lately I’ve seen Summative after Summative after Summative prompt.  And the result is that students are often asked to defend an idea they don’t fully hold yet and this exacerbates the general sense that their writing lacks precision. They are throwing words at the page because their syntactic control is weak but also because they don’t know what they believe yet.

But even if I strike the perfect balance between Summative and Formative Writing, I still face the challenge of poor syntactic control.

Even students who know what they want to say struggle to say it in writing and this gets back to Judith Hochman’s observation. Taken as a whole our writing prompts usually assign writing without teaching it. Especially at the sentence level—how do I capture a complex idea with a nuanced and complex sentence? So students need most of all more of the third kind of writing: Developmental Writing.

Developmental Writingis writing designed to teach students how to write—to expand their syntactic control.

It includes sentence expansion activities like “ But, Because, So ” and other similar exercises that Hochman describes in her book such as expanding sentences via appositives or sentence combining exercises. It includes writing and revising single sentences via Art of the Sentence and Show Call , sometimes using prompts that cause students to learn to start sentences with introductory prepositional phrases, say or adverbial phrases.  And then using single sentences as fodder for study, re-crafting and revision via Show Call.  It means a sequence of exercises—deliberate practice—designed to help students master the tools of syntactic control.

But I almost never see that in classrooms.  And the other types of writing won’t work unless A) they are in balance and B)  there is plenty of Developmental Writing. [A key caveat here. As Hochman points out Developmental Writing must be embedded in the content you are teaching so students have plenty to say and are driven to express something with their sentences.  Ask: “Is Jonas right to take Gabriel.  Begin with an introductory preposition such as, “In the end…” rather than “Write about something you did this summer. Begin with an introductory preposition such as, “In July…”]

Anyway, I’m going to write about this again later this week but for now my recommendation is to read:

  • The first 68 pages or so of Hochman’s The Writing Revolution.
  • Art of the Sentence and Show Call from TLAC 2.0
  • Writing is Revising and Art of the Sentence from Reading Reconsidered.
  • Possibly Fearn and Farnan’s Writing Effectively

And then set out to ensure that students write a ton—both Formatively and Summatively and both after and as you invest deeply in Developmental Writing; it is this third kind of writing that is the foundation of the others and that is by far the least often assigned.

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5 Responses to “Three Types of Writing in the Classroom”

  1. November 14, 2017 at 7:42 am

    Absolutely agree – there is a problem, I think, in UK classrooms where children are taught less how to write, and more how to show they understand something someone else has written. Learning to write is often the preserve of extra curricular creative writing classes, which of course few students attend. I shall check out your links with interest.

  2. December 11, 2017 at 2:27 am

    I loved this distinction and shared it with the coaches I work with. About two weeks after reading this, I saw a particularly interesting implementation of what you describe as developmental writing, with an emphasis on embedding the writing in the content, as you mention. The school I was at (Memphis Delta Prep) had created all these writing “drills” that were basically versions of Hochman’s sentence expansions, with the twist that each set was related to a STEP bottom line. So if students were doing lots of work with Character Mental State in their reading and comprehension conversations, they’d be doing sentence expansion drills with things like:
    “John thought he should be first, but…”
    “John thought he should be first, because…”
    “John thought he should be first, so…”
    It seemed to make the writing – and the talking – they did about reading – and particularly about character mental state – more effective. And in the context of your post it made me think about the bridge from developmental to formative writing.
    Thanks as always for providing lenses to think about the intentionality of what’s happening in strong schools and classrooms.

  3. December 19, 2017 at 7:35 pm

    Quoting: “Typically I will enter a classroom and watch students writing industriously, answering prompts about the texts they are reading. As I observe I will note that they are producing diligent but often non-sensical writing—a hodge-podge of phrases and words strung together in largely inchoate ways. Kids are earnestly trying to respond to a complex prompt but they have very little Syntactic Control, which Bruce Saddler defines as “the ability to create a variety of sentences that clearly express an intended meaning” and which we sometimes adapt in our workshops as the ability to use a variety of syntactic structures to create a variety of sentences that clearly express an intended meaning.“I see, as Judith Hochman puts it The Writing Revolution, a lot of writing assigned but not a lot of learning to write.”

    These are great questions being discussed here and they are on the mark. The issue of sentence production versus essay composition matters a lot.

    In my Readable Writing Method I focus on lucid and compact sentences. I teach students what goes into short and lucid sentences, and I make them practice that kind of sentence both in isolation and in the context of saying something more complex. You need to see what a sentence is doing in isolation, and you need to see what it’s doing within a paragraph or a short essay. You need to be able to see a sentence with both kinds of focus. Students can learn that shifting of focus, if you set them up to do so. You want your freshmen to be able to say, “This is a good clear sentence because of X,” and you also want them to be able to say, “This adds an interesting point to the argument because of X.”

    In my courses, a typical answer to the first question would go: “This is a good clear sentence because the verb is active, the main noun or subject is interesting, and the sentence is 19 words long.” A typical answer to the second question would be: “This sentence adds an interesting point to the argument because the reader may not have thought about the AutoBahn, and the images of the road and its vehicles are vivid.”

    There’s more about this at http://www.readablewriting.com .

    • January 2, 2018 at 2:38 pm

      Thanks for this, John. Gonna check out your method as well. –Doug

  4. February 5, 2018 at 11:01 pm

    Returning to this post, I note that Doug makes the point that we don’t know what we have to say until we think about it. I just saw a play yesterday, Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” and at least in this performance of the play, I’m not sure whether it was a tragedy or a comedy. I’m still thinking about it, and I have a right to think about it until I come to my own conclusions. Lemov is right to insist that students must be allowed to make up their own minds, and also, to invent the categories that they want to think with. Forcing them into writing about prefab answers kills or at least numbs the inner movement that thinking is. We have to give them time to think.

    Students in my freshman comp class, the underprepared ones, often say, “I don’t know how to put my idea into words.” My answer is, “Just throw some words on the idea and start. Anything will do. You can improve the language later. Just throw some words on there. Clumsy is fine.”

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